Marriages often appear more fragile from the outside looking in, possibly because the daily exertion of staying married entails wildly different calisthenics from couple to couple. The open communication that keeps one couple thriving would tear another couple apart within minutes. The delineation of tasks that keeps one couple safe from destitution and filth would feel horribly rigid to another. The mutual teasing and sly insults that make one couple feel more alive might have another reduced to fisticuffs in seconds. Thus, to be married is to view other couples through divorce-colored glasses: Even when they’re engaged in the very exercises that hold them together, they might as well be huffing spray paint and sleeping with the nanny instead.

That said, Dani Shapiro could make even a moment of weakness with a can of Rust-Oleum sound like poignant revelry with some timeless yet romantically volatile elements. In the first pages of “Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage,” her late-middle-age, state-of-my-union memoir, the author gazes out the window at her husband on the lawn in his white terry-cloth bathrobe. He has purchased a gun so that he can kill a pesky woodpecker destroying the exterior of their home in the Connecticut countryside. But she doesn’t like guns. “A gust of wind lifts the hem of the bathrobe,” Shapiro writes, “exposing his pale legs as he stands on a sheet of snow-covered ice.” We quickly grasp the real problem: Our fearless heroine finds herself married to an aging, not-so-Wile-E.-Coyote. One with pale legs.

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Dani ShapiroCreditKwaku Alston

Soon this moment of disillusionment dissolves into a larger portrait of loss and regret. But even though the basement floods regularly, even though the cold wind flows through a crack in the door, even though the couple have seen tough times — their son had a near-fatal illness as a baby, her mother died of cancer, his mother suffers from Alzheimer’s — Shapiro clings eloquently to her faith that they’ll make it through it all. The biggest struggle, though, seems to lie in her perspective on the somewhat unfamiliar man her husband has become. Once a courageous foreign correspondent, M. (as Shapiro refers to her husband in the book) has spent the past 18 years as a screenwriter — one who, like most screenwriters, sometimes sells his work and sometimes doesn’t. Shapiro has certainly had her share of career highs: Three popular memoirs and a televised interview with Oprah represent the kind of success most writers only dream about. But while Shapiro seems to worry more about their financial future, M. handles the finances and has been known to make mistakes. The health insurance lapsed and he didn’t tell her; she finds herself frustrated and nervous about what the future holds for them.

Such brutal honesty is the bread and butter of the marriage memoir, yet Shapiro still manages to make her husband sound quirky and tenacious in the manner of the best romantic comedy leads. And her prose has a way of making even mundane disappointments feel portentous and universal, if a little melodramatic: “I’ll take care of it, M. said. A familiar refrain, one I have always loved and longed to believe. … The creaky house, the velocity of time, the accretion of sorrow. The things that can and cannot be fixed. I’ll take care of it.” But M. does not seem to be taking care of it. He spends six months writing a TV pilot that might never get made, and the couple have no savings and no retirement plan.

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This is where the record scratches to a halt. Shapiro is 52 and her husband is 59; they live in what sounds like a big house in “the wilds of Connecticut”; they founded a writers’ conference in Italy; they fly to the West Coast to have lunches with studio executives. Yet they don’t have a cent saved for retirement? Suddenly the title “Hourglass” seems less apt than, say, “Time Bomb.” The nostalgic tone feels less freewheeling and poetic than dark and suspenseful now. Even the charming son who is “funny and kind” and has a “vast network of friends” can’t lighten the mood, nor can the vague musing (“How do you suppose time works?”), or the scattered reflections on unexpected misfortune (“Where does hope go when it vanishes? Does it live in a place where it attaches itself to other lost hopes?”), or even the weighty-sounding but abstract quotations (“‘A mosaic,’ writes Terry Tempest Williams, ‘is a conversation between what is broken’”).

To Shapiro’s credit, by the end of her short book, we want to know what will happen next — but we come away with more philosophical musing instead. “Time is like a tall building made of playing cards,” she tells us, meaning we’re all in this crazy, unpredictable mess together. But we’re not quite buying it. “Use sturdier building materials!” we want to tell her. Then again, maybe this is the true lure of the marriage memoir: We are gathered here today to witness a two-person catastrophe in motion, a leap of faith that ends, at least half of the time, in a cloud of dust at the bottom of a tall cliff.

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Ada CalhounCreditJena Cumbo

In “Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give,” Ada Calhoun takes a much more lighthearted approach to the toils and snares of marriage in the hazy light of midlife. Springing from a New York Times Modern Love column, Calhoun’s memoir reads like a series of light and funny essays, formed from original, engrossing anecdotes interspersed with somewhat more predictable life lessons. Calhoun and her husband have been married since they were in their 20s, and she writes, “I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be single again.” When their son was a toddler, her husband confessed that he had feelings for another woman. Later, Calhoun had a brief dalliance with a handsome colleague while she was out of town on a book tour. Even so, the stakes never feel that high: The couple decide together that seeing other people is a bad idea. In spite of his own brief emotional entanglement, her husband comes across as a charming weirdo who seems just as willing to own his blind spots and weaknesses as she does.

Calhoun offers marital anecdotes rich with the alternating warmth and pathos that typify a long-lasting union: When her husband discovers her on the floor sorting Playmobil pieces from Legos and asks “What are you doing?” Calhoun memorably replies, “A dramatization of why there are no Great American Novels by women.” But her attempts to summarize the eternal themes of marriage present a jarring change in tone, one that constitutes the book’s weakest passages. It’s as if every time we downshift from the delightfully odd specifics of Calhoun’s family life to the sweeping, perfume-infused inquiries of lady magazines (“How might we learn to appreciate our spouse’s quirks in the moment?”), a little angel trades in its tramp stamp for a waffle iron. But considering the fact that wedding toasts are either surprisingly moving or hopelessly dull, it probably makes sense that Calhoun’s extended paean to marriage is a little bit of both.

In her memoir of “midlife reckoning” called “Love and Trouble,” Claire Dederer sidesteps both theatrical prose and broad clichés in favor of frank and colorful admissions of impatience, lust and guilt. Maybe because Dederer never tries to sweeten her suffering with sentimentality, it feels less onerous to ride sidesaddle on her journey through the barren flats of holy matrimony. Dederer’s midlife struggle is also less focused on disappointment or frustration than it is on her own shifting identity: She feels older but still wants to be ravished. She feels liberated from outdated expectations of herself but still wants more excitement in her life. And alarmingly enough, work doesn’t provide the same refuge it once did. “A new inertia has overcome you,” she writes. “You are shaken and insecure, and simultaneously enervated.” Dederer is struggling with an odd mix of writer’s block, midlife crisis and sexual reawakening.

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Claire DedererCreditJenny Jimenez

But just as a potential affair seems to present itself, Dederer swerves into an extended reminiscence of her reckless formative years as a sexual conquistador. These pages are more detailed than expected, and include, among other things, an elaborate map of the Seattle cool-kid hangouts from her high school years (“all the dishwashers at Pizza Haven were heavy metal guitarists”); a recollection of her first serious boyfriend, who had “floppy Steve Prefontaine hair” and manual techniques that left much to be desired; and a veritable laundry list of drugs taken, sexually transmitted diseases treated, and attempts at achieving True Lust thwarted. Dederer’s comical, erratic storytelling is nuanced and unpredictable, dwelling on the recklessness of youth without ever selling short the courage and daring it took to be so reckless. She brings all of the arrogance and longing of early sexual exploration to vivid life with real empathy and verve.

But there’s darkness in the mix, here, too: After her mother’s adult male friend climbs into her sleeping bag when she is 13 years old, her understanding of her own desire is muddled irreparably. This explains why we’re offered not one but two chapters that are open letters to Roman Polanski, an indulgence we might be more willing to endure if the book’s initial seduction weren’t dropped and never revisited, while another encounter in a hotel — which serves as a kind of climax to her crisis — remains unnervingly vague: “A man slips into the room with me before I can stop him.” Wait — who is this stranger? Is this an assault? She never explains.

Instead, Dederer offers up a chapter analyzing the reasons for her sexual proclivities. “My agent wanted an answer, so I did this: I traced my hypersexuality back to an incident. It’s because Jack Wolf got in the ol’ sleeping baggerino in 1980.” The odd use of cute language (baggerino?) seems like an attempt to evade her discomfort with the subject at hand. Even so, Dederer leans in — way in — with an extended analysis of her desire to be dominated in bed: “Whether I like it or not, as I grow older and lose my beauty, I also lose the opportunity to be victimized in the particular way I crave and fear.”

Dederer is an excellent writer who spins her prose with the casual grace and easy humor of a seasoned professional (she has been a critic and journalist for years and wrote the best-selling 2012 memoir “Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses”). Yet by the end of the book, her strange, nonlinear tour ends up feeling a little rushed and incomplete. We don’t get to peek behind the curtains that are central to the story (Who is this mystery lover — or is he an attacker?) yet we’re invited to ruminate on Roman Polanski’s past at length, analyze Dederer’s libido in uncomfortable ways, hear her agent’s questionable directives, and learn that her husband wants her to hurry up and finish it so she can get paid (“Sell a book, he said. I’m going as fast as I can, I said”). As brazenly honest as these passages might be, perhaps they suggest that in a marriage memoir — as in marriage itself — total honesty is at once necessary and the biggest liability of all.

Heather Havrilesky is a columnist for New York magazine and the author of “How to Be a Person in the World.”